Initial perceptions in negotiations: evaluation and response to ‘logrolling’ offers

In negotiations, where several issues are under consideration and parties have different priorities among these issues, integrative agreements can be reached through ‘logrolling’: concessions on low priority issues in exchange for gains on higher priority issues. The present research focuses on the potential role of initial offers in the development of integrative agreements. We show first, that in a simulated competitive market the specific composition of initial offers influences the final agreements, beyond the effect predicted by their overall value. In order to obtain some insight into the judgmental processes that might play a role, we explore the way in which inexperienced negotiators presented with a hypothetical negotiation context evaluate and respond to logrolling versus distributive initial offers. Three hypotheses were tested: logrolling offers convey an implicit message of cooperation, logrolling offers promote understanding of the mutual interest structure of the task, and, finally, logrolling offers establish within‐issue anchors. Results do not support the first two hypotheses: logrolling offers were not necessarily judged more attractive than distributive ones, and they did not seem to affect the deeply rooted fixed‐pie assumption. However, initial offers did establish within‐issue anchors: counter‐offers were affected by the specific composition of the initial offers beyond the effect of their overall value. This anchoring process resulted in logrolling offers yielding a higher profit for their initiator, as well as higher combined profits for both parties. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Eliminating recency with self‐review: the case of auditors' ‘going concern’ judgments

This paper examines the use of self‐review to debias recency. Recency is found in the ‘going concern’ judgments of staff auditors, but is successfully eliminated by the auditor's use of a simple self‐review technique that would be extremely easy to implement in audit practice. Auditors who self‐review are also less inclined to make audit report choices that are inconsistent with their going concern judgments. These results are important because the judgments of staff auditors often determine the type and extent of documentation in audit workpapers and serve as preliminary inputs for senior auditors' judgments and choices. If staff auditors' judgments are affected by recency, the impact of this bias may be impounded in the ultimate judgments and choices of senior auditors. Since biased judgments can expose auditors to significant costs involving extended audit procedures, legal liability and diminished reputation, simple debiasing techniques that reduce this exposure are valuable. The paper also explores some future research needs and other important issues concerning judgment debiasing in applied professional settings. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is this still called a dog? 18‐month‐olds' generalization of familiar labels to unusual objects

In two experiments the flexibility of 18‐month‐olds' extension of familiar object labels was investigated using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. The first experiment tested whether infants consider intact and incomplete objects as equally acceptable referents for familiar labels. Infants looked equally long at the intact and incomplete objects whether or not a label was presented. In the second experiment, infants were requested to find the referent of a target word among an incomplete target and an intact distracter or an intact target and an incomplete distracter. The incomplete objects were missing a large or small part. Infants looked longer at the incomplete target, even when large or small parts were deleted. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants do not hold a strong shape bias when generalizing familiar words. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Funding,objectivity and the socialization of medical research

There has been a sharp rise in private funding of medical research, especially in relation to patentable products. Several serious problems with this are described. A solution involving the elimination of patents and public funding administered through extended national health care systems is proposed. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an International Conference on “Conflict of Interest and its Significance in Science and Medicine” held in Warsaw, Poland on 5–6 April, 2002.     

Covert processing of faces in prosopagnosia is restricted to facial expressions: evidence from cross-modal bias

We present a single case study of a brain-damaged patient, AD, suffering from visual face and object agnosia, with impaired visual perception and preserved mental imagery. She is severely impaired in all aspects of overt recognition of faces as well as in covert recognition of familiar faces. She shows a complete loss of processing facial expressions in recognition as well as in matching tasks. Nevertheless, when presented with a task where face and voice expressions were presented concurrently, there was a clear impact of face expressions on her ratings of the voice. The cross-modal paradigm used here and validated previously with normal subjects (de Gelder & Vroomen, 1995, 2000), appears as a useful tool in investigating spared covert face processing in a neuropsychological perspective, especially with prosopagnosic patients. These findings are discussed against the background of different models of the covert recognition of face expressions.     

Do dispositional attributions regarding peer endorsers influence product evaluations?

The effect of a peer endorsement advertisement on research participants' attitudes toward the advertised product was examined. An advertisement for a Seiko watch and a questionnaire were administered to participants. The degree of dispositional attributions regarding the endorser's motivation and participants' subsequent attitudes associated with the Seiko watch were measured. In addition, other factors that might affect product evaluation were measured. Whether product evaluation could be accounted for by correspondence bias was investigated. The results showed that the degree of dispositional attributions correlated with product evaluations. There was no correspondence bias. Possible causes for the lack of correspondence bias are discussed and a model suggesting factors accounting for participants' product evaluations is presented.     

Differentiating between memory and interpretation biases in socially anxious and nonanxious individuals

Although individual cognitive biases toward threat in social anxiety are well established, few studies have examined the manner in which cognitive biases work in conjunction. In the present study, socially anxious ( n = 54 ) and nonanxious ( n = 58 ) individuals read 10 passages consisting of positive social or evaluative, negative social or evaluative, and neutral content and completed two cognitive tasks assessing memory of factual details and interpretation immediately and after 48 h. Socially anxious and nonanxious individuals did not differ in their memory for details presented in the passages. However, they made less positive and more negative interpretations of details included in the passages, particularly in positive passages that were self-relevant and particularly in positive passages after the delay. After including depression, state anxiety, and trait anxiety as covariates, biased interpretation of positive passages after the time delay remained significant, but biased interpretation of the self-relevant, positive passages did not. It is concluded that socially anxious individuals are characterized by accurate memory of threatening, factual material, but that they impose a biased interpretation upon that material, especially after some time has passed.     

Preattentive bias for snake words in snake phobia?

Stroop interference and skin conductance responses (SCRs) for words related to snakes, spiders, flowers, and mushrooms were studied in a group of women (n=40) with snake phobia who were randomised to a stress or no-stress condition. The 21 low-stress snake phobics showed Stroop interference for unmasked (but not for masked) snake words, compared with 21 age- and sex-matched controls. Stroop interference was not significantly different between high-stress and low-stress snake phobics. No support for stronger SCRs for masked snake words was found in snake phobics in a lexical decision task with masked presentations of the same words. The lack of a masked Stroop interference in snake phobics suggests a possible difference in cognitive-emotional mechanisms underlying specific phobia vs. other anxiety disorders that deserves further investigation.     

Sensitivity to relative reinforcer rate in concurrent schedules: independence from relative and absolute reinforcer duration

Twelve pigeons responded on two keys under concurrent variable-interval (VI) schedules. Over several series of conditions, relative and absolute magnitudes of reinforcement were varied. Within each series, relative rate of reinforcement was varied and sensitivity of behavior ratios to reinforcer-rate ratios was assessed. When responding at both alternatives was maintained by equal-sized small reinforcers, sensitivity to variation in reinforcer-rate ratios was the same as when large reinforcers were used. This result was observed when the overall rate of reinforcement was constant over conditions, and also in another series of concurrent schedules in which one schedule was kept constant at VI ached 120 s. Similarly, reinforcer magnitude did not affect the rate at which response allocation approached asymptote within a condition. When reinforcer magnitudes differred between the two responses and reinforcer-rate ratios were varied, sensitivity of behavior allocation was unaffected although response bias favored the schedule that arranged the larger reinforcers. Analysis of absolute response rates ratio sensitivity to reinforcement occurrred on the two keys showed that this invariance of response despite changes in reinforcement interaction that were observed in absolute response rates on the constant VI 120-s schedule. Response rate on the constant VI 120-s schedule was inversely related to reinforcer rate on the varied key and the strength of this relation depended on the relative magnitude of reinforcers arranged on varied key. Independence of sensitivity to reinforcer-rate ratios from relative and absolute reinforcer magnitude is consistent with the relativity and independence assumtions of the matching law.     

Verb frame frequency as a predictor of verb bias

There is considerable evidence showing that the human sentence processor is guided by lexical preferences in resolving syntactic ambiguities. Several types of preferences have been identified, including morphological, syntactic, and semantic ones. However, the literature fails to provide a uniform account of what lexical preferences are and how they should be measured. The present paper provides evidence for the view that lexical preferences are records of prior linguistic experience. We show that a type of lexial syntactic preference, viz., verb biases as measured by norming experiments, can be approximated by verb frame frequencies extracted from a large, balanced corpus using computational learning techniques.